The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Entitlement management refers to determining which users, applications, or other entities are entitled to access a particular application program, server or other resource in a network. In past approaches, entitlement management for application programs and application servers generally has been implemented within a particular application program, and the entitlement management logic of one application has been inaccessible to, or incompatible with, other applications. For example, the user authentication logic of an Oracle RDBMS system is normally inaccessible to the user authentication logic of a Microsoft Exchange Server program. Further, user authentication systems that are used to control admission of a user to a protected network are normally inaccessible to the application servers.